/s/ aspiration in Andalusian Spanish in word internal position and across word boundaries: an experimental study of four cities

Paul O'Neill

doi:10.30827/3020.9854rvcl.1.2.2024.32243

Authors

Paul O'Neill Institute for Romance Philology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9152-527X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/3020.9854rvcl.1.2.2024.32243

Keywords:

Andalusian Spanish, aspiration, gemination, sound change, morphologisation

Abstract

This study presents acoustic data relating to the realisation of coda /s/ in four cities in Andalusia. It differs from the majority of recent studies in that it analyses the effects of coda /s/ on all types of consonants, both word-internally and across word-boundaries. In the latter context, different morphological values of /s/ are also analysed. The results suggest that the phonological system of Andalusian Spanish is being radically altered. In word internal position, the historical effects of /s/ aspiration are producing a series of new incipient phonemic distinctions of which the most robust are elongated and/or aspirated consonants. As for across word-boundaries, the findings are only significantly different from word-internal coda /s/ for the city of Seville. For the speech of this city, it seems that /s/ has been lost / is being lost when it is a marker of 2sg on verbs and plural on nouns. However, when /s/ is part of lexeme, i.e. in the word dos ‘two’, the phonetic cues are robust and similar to those in word-internal position. I end the article with a tentative hypothesis as to how this situation could be effecting the morphological system and point to possible future developments.

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Author Biography

Paul O'Neill, Institute for Romance Philology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

Paul O'Neill completed his undergraduate degree in Classics and Spanish at the University of Oxford (Brasenose College). He then moved to Madrid to carry out the Spanish equivalent of a MPhil in Lingüística Teórica y sus Aplicaciones at the Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset. He wrote his MPhil thesis on the phonetics of the Andalusian variety of Spanish. He then returned to Oxford to complete a DPhil on historical morphology in Ibero-Romance). He is currently a Professor of Romance Philology at LMU, Munich. His research focuses on language variation and change.

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